


I to Eye

by yeontanhyung



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Supernatural Elements, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Creepy, Dark, Fear, Flashbacks, Gen, Horror, Night, One Shot, POV First Person, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25722181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeontanhyung/pseuds/yeontanhyung
Summary: I peeled off my rancid clothes and resigned myself to observe my face in the mirror. My skin was beginning to grey and my cheeks had become so hollow that I almost didn’t recognize myself. Strangely, my reflection didn’t startle me at all. I don’t think I expected my appearance to change the way that it had, but I wasn’t not expecting it either. I simply stared back at myself, unblinking.My reflection blinked at me. I never blinked.I pulled the same clothes back on, opened the door to my home, and left.
Kudos: 2





	I to Eye

It’s been thirty-two weeks. Thirty-two weeks and two days to be more precise. For thirty-two weeks and two days I can’t shake off this feeling that I’m not, well, me. Either that or something that’s not me is living in my house, living in me, and I have no control over it. It simply comes and goes as it pleases.

This weird feeling of another presence started on the Friday of the last holiday weekend. I’m a stocker at the local grocery store. Not the most grand job, believe me I know, but someone has to do it. I work the night shift which often ends up in me clocking out at the early hours of the morning, just a few shifts of the hour hand on the clock before the store opens up to the public. That Friday night was one of the days that I clocked out late. One of the delivery trucks was running a day behind schedule, so a few of my coworkers and I had to stay over an extra four hours to unload everything, take inventory, and get it all on the shelves as quickly as possible to avoid having the aisles full of crates once the store opened. We managed to finish in time, and I clocked out a few minutes after 5am. The buses around here stop running at one, so I had to walk home. It isn’t far of a walk, maybe ten minutes at most, so it typically doesn’t worry me too much. When I do run across someone else at that hour, it’s often just a drunken man stumbling out of a bar, mumbling nonsense at no one in particular, just the unlit buildings listening to his strings of words. That night, I saw no drunken man. I heard no drunken man. I certainly was no drunken man. 

Walking home, I watched the ground with each step to make sure I wouldn’t trip over anything littering the cracked concrete in the dark. The sidewalk was dimly lit by the intervals of streetlamps, and my shadow stretched out before me, looking more and more like the silhouette of a sycamore against an overcast sky. After a few minutes of cautioned walking, I approached the front door of my apartment building and was just about to wriggle my key into the lock when I noticed something was… off. The whole way home, I had just one shadow. Now, eyes cast downward yet again as I was unlocking my door, I saw that I didn’t have one shadow. I had two. My “normal” shadow, I guess you could call it, was an opaque black. But this one, this one was an ashy grey - not so much of a shadow in and of itself as it appeared to be an offset of my actual shadow. It felt like I was looking at a wall that had been bleached with light, revealing a narrow strip of the original color where a wall hanging had been replaced with another of a smaller size. At first I thought that maybe there was another light source besides the streetlamp, and I just hadn’t cared to notice the partner to my shadow before. I looked around, but there was no other light source in sight. All that was there was a singular streetlamp, consistently giving out the same amount of light, a soldier standing guard at the entrance to my apartment.

Dismissing the occurrence as a consequence of a lack of sleep, I shook my head quickly to rearrange my thoughts and focus back on unlocking the door. The door arced open with a squeak of its aging hinges, and I quickly slipped inside. My hand felt along the wall of the entryway for the lightswitch, and with a bit more urgency than usual, I flipped the switch. Light cascaded over the interior of my apartment, and before I realized that I was holding my breath, an exhale escaped my lips. I turned on my heel and locked the door behind me.

I wanted to shake off the thought of the second shadow, trust me, but I couldn’t. I wanted to believe that exhaustion had made me hallucinate, but once I entered my apartment I felt completely awake, like I had just splashed ice-cold water on my face. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep until I had some peace of mind, so I walked to every room in my apartment, played with the lights, and checked my shadow. I went to the bathroom, the kitchen, my bedroom, even the storage room, but nothing was amiss. My shadow was the same no matter where I went. I started to think that maybe it was due to exhaustion, and the fear from the event had startled me into a state of wakefulness. Convincing myself of that, I felt more at ease and went back into the bathroom to wash up. It took me longer to fall asleep that night because my mind seemed to be unconvinced of my conclusion, but I squeezed my eyes even tighter and repeatedly told myself that I was tired and needed to sleep. Eventually, I did.

The next few weeks went by as normal. Work was hectic because a lot of the inventory had been emptied after the long weekend. Truthfully, it seemed as if every student and salaryman in town had thrown a party to celebrate the extra 24 hours off from their dreary routines. I had a fair share of customers get angry at me when I explained to them that there was no more of whatever they were in search of in the back, but that’s to be expected. Not everyone can be as understanding as we hope. Due to the business, there were several days where I clocked out after 5am again, and on those days in particular I paid close attention to my shadow when walking home, especially at the door to my apartment. I saw nothing. In fact, I never saw the double shadow again. Not in the entire thirty-two-weeks-and-two-days period. I began to fall asleep more quickly at night, this time fully convinced that my experience that Friday was nothing more than a one-time event. Before long, I forgot about it entirely. I guess my worries dissipated too soon. 

You know, in the period where I was hyper conscious of my surroundings, it was only during the night hours. As a child you are always scared of the dark. Who would be scared of the light? In the light there are no hairy monsters under the bed to consume your foot if it dares slip outside from under the covers, no boogeyman in the closet ready to pop out as soon as you close your eyes like a jack-in-the-box, no mysterious thuds and creaks emanating from the pitch black of the corridors in your apartment. There is no reason to be afraid of the light. That is, there didn’t seem to be a reason. 

When I was still afraid of the night I made sure to run all of my errands before sundown. Unfortunately there was no chance of getting home before dark unless I quit my job, but the pay was only enough to keep me living paycheck to paycheck. Quitting wasn’t a sliver of an option. So, I made sure that once work ended, the time between wakefulness and sleep was as razor thin as humanly possible, and began to jog home instead of running.

It was at this point that I discovered a paradox. The more fearful I grew of the dark, the less frightened I felt of what I saw that occupied it. In turn, it made me fear what I couldn’t see in the dark. I became accustomed to listing off the charcoal colored blobs in my vision at night as the silhouette of a shrub, the pair of jeans crumpled and forgotten in a pile on the floor, or the shadow of my desk chair cast by the light of the bone-white moon outside. These assumptions became automatic and I stopped being afraid of the miscellaneous physical amalgamations of darkness. But, if those objects were mere things as clothes and furniture, what were the things that I couldn’t see, hiding in the corners and crevasses where the dust bunnies and spiders make their homes? I found myself stuck in this loop of fear and the absence of it. I feared the dark since I was little, but this degree of fear was something new altogether. 

A burn on my skin, the sensation that was the second shadow vanished from my consciousness. The mark, however, remained in my elevated fear of the dark. 

I should have taken that as a sign. I should have known that just as fear festers in the dark, so does it in the light. 

In the time when my fear of the dark had grown into a figure taller than me, I had gotten myself into the habit of waking up early to run all my errands, and if I had no work that day, to go to sleep as soon as the sun laid to rest. In honesty, the incident did me a bit of good. I developed an impressive sleep schedule compared to the standards of my college years when I had run on canned triple shot espressos from Starbucks and chewy caffeine gummies. Now, I was waking up just as the sun would rise, no longer needing my cheap IKEA alarm clock that rested on the nightstand. My body clock adjusted itself after those weeks. Around 6am, I would wake up and open the curtains just in time to see the deep crimson light creep up over the horizon during the sunrise. It gave me an appreciation I never had before for early mornings. Suddenly the saying “the early bird catches the worm” made sense. Those sunrises were delicious. 

Last Sunday, I woke up just as normal and opened the curtains, eager to see the hues of pink that the clouds would be when mixed with the crimson of the sky. It crossed my mind that the sky was like a watercolor painting that I had seen in a shop window while running errands a few days before. The artist of the painting must be an early riser too. 

The rumbling in my stomach startled me from the daze that the sky had put me into. I padded over to the doorway of my room, but then I… stopped? Was stopped? I can’t quite figure out what had made me halt in place. I had every intention to go into the kitchen and stuff myself with a hearty omelette, and my stomach rumbled again as if to remind me. I tried to will myself to move, but I couldn’t. Somehow I had become paralyzed, my body as stiff as a cadaver. A fear completely unlike my fear of the dark consumed me. I became overwhelmed with this feeling that I was drowning in molasses, dread filling my lungs and my veins. All I could do was shift my vision towards the window, and see that the crimson sky and pink clouds were no more. Everything had become grey. 

Just as suddenly as the paralyzation had creeped into my bones, it vanished. I was completely and utterly aware of the ability to move again immediately. It felt like a switch had been flipped somewhere. A switch flipped off in my stomach too, it seemed. I didn’t want an omelette anymore. I didn’t want anything.

The aftermath of the incident that morning flooded me with memories of the shadow eight weeks ago. I had seen the light as my shield. Nothing could possibly happen in the light, or so I thought. From then on, each day the same thing happened to me over, and over, and over. 

I am terrified of the dark. I am terrified of the light. I am terrified of sleep. I am terrified of wakefulness.

I stopped going to work. I can’t bring myself to leave my home anymore. My home is the only thing that I can somewhat predict the happenings of, and even it has betrayed me. But, leaving my home would only unleash an unbound realm of possibilities that I can in no way predict. I stay home. I stay in the same clothes. I eat the same meals. I am on the same paycheck that I left my last shift with. Soon I will even be rid of material security. I am days away from being purely broke. I am broke and broken. 

Today was the last straw. This morning I went to the bathroom to take a shower. Staying in the same clothes made me smell so foul that I wanted to crawl out of my very own skin and toss it into the laundry machine. I had to shower. So, my feet met the cool tile floor as they carried me to the bathroom.

I peeled off my rancid clothes and resigned myself to observe my face in the mirror. My skin was beginning to grey and my cheeks had become so hollow that I almost didn’t recognize myself. Strangely, my reflection didn’t startle me at all. I don’t think I expected my appearance to change the way that it had, but I wasn’t not expecting it either. I simply stared back at myself, unblinking. 

My reflection blinked at me. I never blinked. 

I pulled the same clothes back on, opened the door to my home, and left.

**Author's Note:**

> hi i hope you enjoyed this! i thought of this horror story one night when i couldn't fall asleep and was so excited to type it up. i didn't have many expectations for it and made stuff up as i went so i hope it wasn't too bad ;_; but i had lots of fun writing it and i hope you enjoyed reading it! im still fairly new to writing so i would really appreciate if you could leave any suggestions for how i can improve my writing <3 thank you so much for reading!


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